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We've been trying to avoid it, but we're in the busy season and during our second shift today we lost channels. My DTG manager is meticulous about daily maintenance (beginning of day, end of day). I mean, spotless cleaning of everything.
Losing a few nozzles is no big deal -- an F1 and we're good to go.
Today, while printing, we lost the black channel during a solid black print. Basically printed 10" of black and then just cyan. F1 and it didn't come back. Ran a nozzle check and black AND magenta were gone -- as well as one entire white channel.
Did all the things learned in training (thanks Tigers) and nothing recovered it. Replaced the dampers -- same problem. Primed the dampers perfectly, still no ink flowing.
Manually checked the capping station and it was pulling ink fine. Did a 5 minute soak on clog prevention solution and were able to see a reasonable nozzle check on all 8 channels, but printing a test print had 3 of the channel drop out again.
Tried everything we could think of, but we have shirts to print so we finally did our first powerclean. 120ml of ink, ouch.
Nozzle check post powerclean was perfect across the board. Test shirt was gorgeous, as expected.
Humidity: 60% consistently for 24/7.
Temperature: 72 degrees consistently for 24/7.
No air blowing on the printer. Encoder strip clean, wiper blade clean (dry fingernail brings up nothing), capping station gasket clean. No extra ink anywhere, no error messages. Autoclean set to every 8 hours.
We've been printing white daily, printing CMYK at least 2 shifts daily, so it isn't old dead ink. I haven't done a waterfall because my experience with waterfalling on other DTG printers isn't all that great. "Fixes" the problem but when it comes back, it's vendetta. Also didn't do a reverse waterfall, yet.
Question: how often have you found that you HAVE to run a powerclean? Of course it differs from shop to shop because of a plethora of reasons, but this is definitely something I have to adjust in my budget line going forward. Just curious how often NeoFamily all have run powercleans.
Thankfully, we're busy. Busy enough to hopefully purchase a second Neoflex in summer -- having a backup of machines you rely on is required if you don't want to put the closed sign up.
Our Neoflex has been stunning so far. Tigers have always gotten back to us quickly. NeoRIP is amazing, and NeoFamily is the best in the industry, bar none. Even better than MimakiFamily, which has been pretty darn good.
Glad that my guys are back to business, and a $20 ink loss is no big deal -- the hours we were down doing other maintenance were far more expensive because of labor and overtime.
Losing a few nozzles is no big deal -- an F1 and we're good to go.
Today, while printing, we lost the black channel during a solid black print. Basically printed 10" of black and then just cyan. F1 and it didn't come back. Ran a nozzle check and black AND magenta were gone -- as well as one entire white channel.
Did all the things learned in training (thanks Tigers) and nothing recovered it. Replaced the dampers -- same problem. Primed the dampers perfectly, still no ink flowing.
Manually checked the capping station and it was pulling ink fine. Did a 5 minute soak on clog prevention solution and were able to see a reasonable nozzle check on all 8 channels, but printing a test print had 3 of the channel drop out again.
Tried everything we could think of, but we have shirts to print so we finally did our first powerclean. 120ml of ink, ouch.
Nozzle check post powerclean was perfect across the board. Test shirt was gorgeous, as expected.
Humidity: 60% consistently for 24/7.
Temperature: 72 degrees consistently for 24/7.
No air blowing on the printer. Encoder strip clean, wiper blade clean (dry fingernail brings up nothing), capping station gasket clean. No extra ink anywhere, no error messages. Autoclean set to every 8 hours.
We've been printing white daily, printing CMYK at least 2 shifts daily, so it isn't old dead ink. I haven't done a waterfall because my experience with waterfalling on other DTG printers isn't all that great. "Fixes" the problem but when it comes back, it's vendetta. Also didn't do a reverse waterfall, yet.
Question: how often have you found that you HAVE to run a powerclean? Of course it differs from shop to shop because of a plethora of reasons, but this is definitely something I have to adjust in my budget line going forward. Just curious how often NeoFamily all have run powercleans.
Thankfully, we're busy. Busy enough to hopefully purchase a second Neoflex in summer -- having a backup of machines you rely on is required if you don't want to put the closed sign up.
Our Neoflex has been stunning so far. Tigers have always gotten back to us quickly. NeoRIP is amazing, and NeoFamily is the best in the industry, bar none. Even better than MimakiFamily, which has been pretty darn good.
Glad that my guys are back to business, and a $20 ink loss is no big deal -- the hours we were down doing other maintenance were far more expensive because of labor and overtime.
. I say time is money and if I can spend 7 minutes on a power clean and I have dozens of shirts to print I am not worried about the ink used/cost during the cleaning. With ink prices being so much lower now the concerns shouldn't be as prevalent.
